Leading With Love 💕

Hello, cadres fear. This is Anila here. Coming to you, leading with love. Coming to you with my lived experience as someone with surviving breast cancer and a number of different mental health conditions. Body focused repetitive behaviors, specifically which is compulsive hair pulling, which is called trichotillomania, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, depression, anxiety, and past alcohol abuse. And, um, today. Hello, Luke. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Today in leading with love, I wanted to talk about something that everyone is doing right now, and that is, hello, Shannon.

Hello, Jules. Welcome to the cadres. Hello, Colleen. Hello, Enlo. Let me know where you are calling in from. Calling in from. Cadre ing in from. Hello, Anna. And also let me know if you have taken your summer vacation yet, because that is what I want to talk to you about. And if so, where have you gone? Or where are you planning to go? Speak wonder. Welcome. Oh, no, I missed some comments. Can't scroll back. But thank you. Thank you, thank you. Happy Wednesday. Good afternoon. So, yeah, in the comments, where have you taken your summer vacation?

Or where are you planning to go? And leading with love. Why is vacation important? So in the work that I do at a company called habitaware that I founded, I help people with body focused repetitive behaviors. Those are hair pulling, skin picking, nail biting, speak wonders. Visiting family in Harrisburg. Very cool. And Jules is traveling to Boston. In Boston. Cool, cool, cool. I'm heading to Tahoe at the end of this summer, so I'm super, super excited for that. And what do vacations and leading with love have in common?

So much. Right? Vacations are a break from real life. Vacations are a reset. Vacations are a way to pack up. Right. These tiny suitcases of just the very littlest bit of things that we need for a short amount of time and leave everything else behind. It is a way to create space for the brain to take a break, for the body to take a break. Where vacations are also a time where you're probably moving more. Maybe you're going swimming, maybe you're going hiking, maybe you're just walking around a new city.

But that's the best way to explore, right? So vacations have so much goodness and richness in them. Experiencing new things, tasting new things, traveling together, that camaraderie, that relationship building. Every time we go away, I have a ten year old and a six year old. Every time we go away, they come back with a new skill or a new level of maturity or a change in them. The last vacation we took was spring break to Mexico and on the hotel property they had bikes. It was a big property. It was still walkable, but it was nice to have a bike to, like, quickly get around.

And they had very few kids bikes. So my six year old, who couldn't ride a bike, was so excited to ride a bike, partly because of that supply and demand issue where it created scarcity. And as soon as he saw a bike, it was now or never. Get on or you're gonna lose it. It's not gonna be there when we get back. So by the end of that trip, he learned to bike ride. Where am I going with all this? So at Habitaware, we do peer coaching, and we help people overcome their hair pulling, their skin picking, their nail biting.

And in one of our chats, it came up, and it comes up constantly. In the ten years that we've been helping people with these conditions, summer, we call it the summer lull. These behaviors disappear. These behaviors go on vacation. And why? It's because we're more relaxed, we're less stressed, we're less in states of discomfort. We're probably outside more on the weekends, maybe going canoeing or going for those walks or bike rides. And so we're giving our brain and our body and our mind space to rest in those ways.

And so with that less stressful environment, kids are not in school. So they're not worrying about tests, they're not worrying about being bullied. They're not worrying about learning and, you know, doing, getting their homework done and getting good grades. They're just allowed to be. So we see these behaviors dip during the summer months, and we see them dip every time we go on vacation. This is a trend within the community. So someone we were, I was coaching shared this. I was on vacation for two weeks, and my skin cleared up and my hair regrew like, yes, that's right.

So how does this all relate to leading with love? Well, simply this, when you lead with love each day, I want you to find a way to create space for a mini vacation every day. That mini vacation is your respite. That mini vacation is your leaving everything behind. Jewel says, I feel energized when I have sun and am able to be outside in the warmth. So, yes, so even just two minutes, step outside in that warmth and look up at the sun, admire the trees blowing in the wind, and give yourself that mini vacation every day.

And in that way, you are teaching your brain. This is what we do. We take these breaks, and you are leading with love. Instead of that, go, go, go, run, run. I don't have time for two minutes outside in the sun. I gotta do laundry, I gotta finish work, I gotta make dinner, I gotta make lunch, I gotta clean the bathroom, whatever it is, right? I gotta make sure my kids do their things. But take that time for you. And that is the challenge that I gave our community, to find those mini vacation moments.

Because every time you do that is leading with love and that is putting you first. And in that same way, that kind of play on words of the word leading, leading with love for yourself, but then also leading is in, like putting yourself first. Right? So that is something that I am taking back with me to my life. I am not waiting until the end of August to have a vacation. I am trying to find those vacation moments every day that allow me to just sit and do nothing and decompress and detach from the frenzy of my real life.

Because ultimately, vacation gives us that opportunity to rebrand, in a sense, to be someone else or to allow other parts of us that are normally not allowed to come out, to come out and allows our whole self to find balance. So that is what I leave you with, that challenge. Not to wait for the vacation, but to find that mini vacation every single day. And if there's any ideas you might have, put them in the comments. So we, we have here step outside in the sun. Mine would be taking walks with my kids on the weekends or taking a walk around the block with my dog every day.

That's my mini vacation now. And I just found out about something called geocaching. So I'm going to introduce that to my kids so we can go on more walks and find cool things around the twin Cities. And in that way, detach and leave things behind so that we can lead with love. And with that, I'm wishing you love, strength and awareness. All the best. And take care and see you next week. Bye. No, we should. I feel like that's a practice that you all do that.